I’ve been irritated all day and have been trying to form a narrative about why. Lata Mangeshkar died over the weekend. Like many other sad diaspora kids, her era of music was one of my key connections to an amorphous notion of a motherland. All very nostalgic and deeply nuanced stuff to get into with power dynamics I need to learn more about to discuss, but suffice it for now to say she was the soundtrack of my childhood. I used to adore the music videos her voice was dubbed over, 11am Sunday watching on Zee TV with my mother. Sometimes my Nanijan would make a spritely face and sing her songs while she was cooking. My mum and I would shriek classics to each other in the car - she even does it now when I’m upset and she wants to cheer me up.
I don’t know the specifics of classical Indian music (and I’m sure that once I got into the research, I’d uncover lots about what classical means in terms of being dominated by a particular region - even music is political. And also that I’m definitely not using the right terminology at the minute and some Western umbrella term - apologies for my limitations, it’s something I want to learn more about). But I know that whatever I listened to when I was growing up continues to echo within me. That Lata Mangeshkar’s music is important to me because, for better or worse, it is part of who I am.
I was in the kitchen yesterday with some friends who are white and European. I told them I wanted to play one of her songs because she had died, and that she was a legend. Instinctively I knew to preface the song with a caveat, that their ears might do as so many other virgin ones have done, and reject it as shrill and dissonant. I mumbled something and pressed play. Immediately, their faces confirmed what I had worried about. This could have been confirmation bias except that one made a face as soon as Lata Mangeshkar started singing. He said the music was good but that her voice was too high. The other remained silent, and when asked what he thought simply said ‘she’s a legend.’ Politely neutral, likely covering displeasure. I could be wrong, but am I?
I turned the song off not halfway through, even though I’d initially said they had to sit through the whole thing. I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up embarrassed by the smell of my food at lunch, or who disliked wearing a shalwar kameez in front of their peers. Second-generation Asians were a majority at my school. But for the first time I felt a shock of real embarrassment, and that in turn made me feel shame. Why did I stop the music? Why did I not show that I valued my own culture by just letting the song play out, sit in the discomfort regardless?
I guess I thought it was too much. I’ve personally always felt afraid of being too much - too loud, too dramatic, too opinionated. I felt the same about the song - I thought it would be these things too. The yawping of the strings that ‘you wouldn’t expect’ to be in any kind of Indian music. The high pitch. The showtuniness of Bollywood. But then I got angry. My friends play Irish sea shanties all the time. They sing Italian ballads in deep registers, too low for me to ever sing along to. They fall in love with them for weeks at a time, play them at every opportunity. I give their music a fair try; sometimes it even grows on me. Some nights I ask them to play something else. But I give their music a chance.
Not that I don’t like it, but I’ve grown up on Western music. You don’t really have the option of ignoring it when you grow up in the UK or the US. In addition to the qawwalis and filmi music, my parents raised me on a diet of Missy Elliot, George Michael, Justin Timberlake, The Chumbawambas, Aaliyah, Tears for Fears, and good old Sting. The first artist I ventured out to ‘discover’ on my own was The Strokes. These two had the privilege of ignoring the music I’d grown up listening to. They didn’t know how ragas sounded, that the lyrics were poetry, that so many Westerns musical references used our music as their reference point (The Beatles, to name a big’un). It seemed so unfair.
‘Unfair’ might feel like a childlike reaction. I have to remind myself that how I feel isn’t unwarranted or childish. Music is an incredible gateway into culture. I could partly enter the worlds of my friends, but at that moment I felt they had no interest in entering mine. And didn’t I deserve to be seen? Didn’t I get to show them the sonic backdrop of my childhood? Sure, they might not have liked the music in the end, even after giving it a fair go. But I don’t need validation in the form of enjoyment - I just wanted to be able to share it with them.
Even now I wonder if this is too dramatic, too much. It’s just music. But music is the thing that makes your hair stand on end, calls your skin to taut attention, sends waves of pleasure through the center of your skull. It’s the beat of our hearts, the pounding of our feet as we walk, the metronomic cadence of our swinging arms. It’s at the core of us, in whatever way we experience it. Of course it’s important. So of course it’s worth sharing.
With all this being said, @discostan shared a post about Lata Mangeshkar. It said that in life ‘she was deeply tied to the RSS and the fascist ideology that is tearing India apart today. She was a lifelong diehard acolyte of Veer Sarvarkar, a key architect of Hindu supremacy, an open admirer of Hitler who believed non-Hindu citizens (especially Muslims and Christians) should be subjugated, and went as far to justify the rape of Muslim women as a political tool. She sang the theme song for Rath Yathra, the nationwide campaign for the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And beyond that she suppressed the careers of other singers, especially those of Muslim women, most notably Mubarak Begum. These are not rumors, and there is documentation of these facts available for those who want to search for them.’ I wonder how a woman who sang so beautifully of Allah could with the same breath, from the very same lips, support these things. It’s incredible how much people are capable of holding, of being, all at once.
This isn’t about cancel culture. Those who have said truly terrible things are never driven away from the spotlight- they remain on the book tour and talk show circuits, publish their crummy thought pieces in major media outlets. Their views, as ‘cancelled’ as they are, are heard and even amplified. Lata Mangeshkar received a state burial. She is known, loved, and honoured by many as the Nightingale of India, including by many Muslims, including by those who do not know these things about her, including by those that do and love her more for it. Even with her contradicting beliefs and actions, her voice still paved a path that allowed me to return to the amorphous, problematic, yet only notion of ‘home’ that I knew. Even though I know the concept of a homeland is made of sand and social constructs, is Gilroy’s undesirable ‘root’ instead of ‘route,’ it still meant something to me. What comforts me a little is knowing that despite her views, Lata Manganeshkar still consistently had my God’s name in her mouth. I wonder if that’s a form of rahma.
Another text we studied at university was ‘Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes. In a very generalised nutshell, his theory posits that an author becomes irrelevant to the text when the text is in the hands of a reader. A reader will always understand a text in their own way, no matter what meaning the author wanted to impart. If you want a rough example, think about a tree. The tree that pops up in your head will be different to the one that appeared in mine. We could be thinking of pine and palm trees, or even linguistic and family trees. Even when we specify parameters and are told to picture an evergreen, the colours, textures, sizes, etc are different in our minds. If we can’t even picture the same damn tree, how are we meant to share the same understanding of terms like ‘love’, and esoteric texts like the Qur’an and the Bible? So in the transference of text from writer to reader, the power to shape the text isn’t with the author anymore, and their influence is present, sure, but their intention, what they ‘really meant,’ in some ways becomes irrelevant. Readers might want to study the life of the author to see if it informed the text, but it won’t really matter because that’s just one way of interpreting it and there are an infinity of other ways to read it, none of which are objectively better or worse than the other. Although perhaps they are subjectively better or worse, depending on the context you’re reading in, or because of what you’re looking to understand. Perhaps it matters sometimes. Is this one of those times?
Another question we ask a lot these days is ‘if the author is deemed ‘problematic’ or ‘cancelled,’ does that mean we ‘can’t’ consume or enjoy their work anymore?’ I think the answer changes all the time. There are too many contextual factors to consider, which we must consider all over again every time we have to ask the question. Will consuming the work profit the author? To what extent? Are we perpetuating an ideology if we consume their work? Is it our fault if we didn’t know about the author before consuming the work? Does their life impact how we understand the work, and to what extent if so? Can our consumption ever be truly passive? Are we making accurate decisions on whose work we want to consume if we don’t have all the facts? Will we ever have all the facts? Are the facts the right facts or misinformation? What if someone has been beloved (by whom?) for a long time, and then suddenly a scandal shows up, even after they’re dead? What if they meant something personal to me, or someone I love? What if I grew up listening to it? Do I have to stop? Do I continue listening with the knowledge of their (alleged or proven) misdeeds? Does that make me a bad person? Do I have to look someone up every time I listen to new music? Will the time I take to do that mean I have to listen to less music and lose the experience of flitting from artist to artist, of concentrating on the sound? Is this a realistic thing to expect a person to do? Is it a question of realism or of values? Should this be the role of the music industry? Who are they to judge someone’s life and decide whether their music should be made public? What if the people making those decisions are not representative of the majority voice? What if they are - and the majority is violent? If we compromise and only carry out due diligence sometimes, what’s the criteria to decide on when ‘sometimes’ is? What questions have I forgotten to ask? What questions don’t I know to ask? What is ethical consumption, indeed? The minute I think I’ve arrived at an answer, it is already departing.
Lata Mangeshkar directly quashed the careers of Muslim women, dehumanised them as war collateral. In some ways, she also unconsciously empowered them - the ones who turned to her music for comfort, and strength. Her songs held these Muslims and so many others as they grew up in London through the 60’s, gave them a glimpse of some kind of culture that they would reference as an aspect of their ‘home,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘identity.’ It’s hard to weight these things - but is it? Shouldn’t the dehumanisation of so many people point to an obvious decision? Can you in any circumstances justify people’s suffering? The answer, for me, is no, but I think it’s possibly the wrong question. Lata Mangeshkar’s positive influence does not ‘justify’ the harm she caused. But her positive influence also doesn’t have to necessarily be judged, or balanced against her harm - we could just hold all of these things at once, understand them all to be facts about her. Again, that’s a choice - one person may feel and choose that they can suspend judgment and just take the good for the good, the bad for the bad. Others may see this as trying to claim neutrality…but in the words of Desmond Tutu, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’ They might feel we need to make a judgement, because only in naming what we find right and wrong within the current context of the binaries and social constructs of the world can we enact the changes we want to see.
On a personal level, I’m struggling to decide which kind of person I am. Or rather, I’m struggling to decide what choice to make, which will inform what kind of person I am. I don’t have some neat conclusion to reach yet - and perhaps never will. I know I don’t feel right giving up Lata Mangeshkar’s music entirely because of the personal value it has to me. Maybe I can download it from somewhere and keep it as a file so I don’t add to the streaming money her estate gets - risk mitigation, harm reduction. Perhaps this is still too close to neutrality.
I want to be the kind of person that can look at a situation and recognise the good in it - though not in a way that trivialises or minimises harm, or over-emphasises the good. That’s as far a conclusion as I can reach for now. Like the end of a cassette tape, my thinking loops back again and again to one point: the songs she is singing, the deity she is calling to, respectively come from the poetic traditions of Muslims, and the religion of Islam. Even in the stark ugliness of her beliefs and actions, even though it was not her intention, there was something she did that I thought was beautiful, that was good. And as much as I can’t escape the harm she caused, it feels wrong of me to see only the harm, to deny the humanity I find in her songs. How even listening to them now, I see myself with my mother, singing in the kitchen.